


Doctor Who - Colepaldi RPF - The meaning of Biscuits

by Samstown4077



Series: Colepaldi Collection [47]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Humour, RPF, Romance, Suppressed Feelings, biscuits - Freeform, pre s9, real person fiction - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 16:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4713494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Samstown4077/pseuds/Samstown4077
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is this trailer for S9 they know by heart and Jenna gets lost in her thoughts about her friendship with Peter. Will they ever be able to sort things out? Oh, and of course.. somewhere in this fic, biscuits play a role ;).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doctor Who - Colepaldi RPF - The meaning of Biscuits

**Author's Note:**

> Also we look back on things and words that have happened while Comic Con and when Peter attended DW Experience this year in April.
> 
> Remember this is RPF, don't like, don't read. This is a fictional happening. When you usually read my fics, you'll realize that I make slight references to old fics.  
> Thanks to my new Beta rad-braybury on tumblr, for helping me out! I can't thank you enough!

Jenna sits on a table, her IPad flat in front of her, slowly dimming down. Her chin rests on her left hand, her teeth nibble at her third finger, while she stares into the middle distance, lost in thought.

It’s somewhere between the last take and ‘let’s call it a day’, she’s not sure — she has lost track of time. She can hear a few people still pacing around the set, shoving props and boxes around. In her subconscious she knows she is not alone on set, has not missed knocking-off time — again. Not that she would care at the moment.

She’s remote from the others, a curtain between the place where she is and the place she works. A little corner they usually create on set, so the actors can move aside, rest, have a moment of privacy, and also be out of the way while stage hands and director rebuild the set or change the light.

The plastic cup of tea is cold already. She hadn’t even sipped from it once up until now, and with a grimace Jenna places the cup away again. Then she sinks back into her thoughts, memories — they’ve been filming for eight or nine month now, and recently they had returned first from the Comic Con in San Diego and the little press tour in Germany. And now they’re all in for the last haul. Only a couple of weeks, and then the new series hits the telly.

Peter has been watching her a while, watching her fingers trail around the edges of the IPad, watching her nibble her fingers, and he smirks when she realizes that the tea is cold and bitter now.

He can’t remember her doing something like this, sitting all by herself, lost in thought — obviously not learning lines — last year. Last year, everything was new, fresh, and all silly jokes between them. A new adventure. It’s still an adventure, but not new anymore; still silly jokes — silly, old jokes now. This year is different. They are closer now and he finds her more often musing about… things.

He rustles the curtain a bit, so she knows he is there — she always knows when it’s him and when it’s someone else. Her head turns merely an inch, and a smirk makes her mouth dart up for a few seconds. Then he sits down, on the chair across from her. His attentive eyes glance down over the IPad, then over her hands, still tracing along the edges of the metal tech-toy.

He leans forward. His forearms land on the table, his right hand comes to rest next to her left, and two of his fingers slip into her open palm.

It’s what he does this year, without thinking and without hesitation. Because it’s _him and Jenna in the Tardis, same old, same old,_ but closer, more aware. “What are you thinking about?”

Her thumb caresses his fingers where they rest in her hand, lightly, absently, yet well aware of what they are doing differently this year to last year. Last year was all about _Jenna is the greatest_ and _Peter is the best_. _From the beginning she was my friend. Look at him. He is a rockstar._

But this year it was all about love. She couldn’t hold back in San Diego, telling 7000 people that she loved him. That it was simply the best to spend almost every day with him in the TARDIS and there was obviously no one who seemed to disagree with it. He had kissed her then, all flustered and embarrassed over her words, “paying her back” the next day, telling them _how fabulous she was_.

“Don’t you know?” she asks, half in a whisper, turning her head in his direction, her eyes on their linked hands.

He knows, of course. “No.” There are confessions between them, unsaid. There always will be. It’s how it works and how it must be.

She smiles, and her hand tighten around his fingers, before she lets go. He smiles too.

Then finally she looks at him, and he rests his elbow on the table, the heel of his hand pressing into his cheek, the other hand rising to stroke a strand of hair behind her ear — all too casually.

“It’s not good,” he begins. “You shouldn’t.” It’s not advice so much as an idea for a solution they both know will not work. They aren't Daleks with a cortex vault to suppress memories.

“You shouldn’t, either,” is all she says before she turns back to the IPad.

Peter watches her type with two fingers on the screen and it comes to life again. It seems she was watching a video, and when she presses the ‘replay’ button he realizes it’s the second trailer for the new series.

He knows it by heart, has seen it a couple times — a couple dozen times — since it came out. So he doesn’t make an attempt to watch the video, but watches her instead. Sees the emotions flicker over her face, fleeting. A twitch here, a short smirk there. Then he can see how her chin throws little crinkles, her lips press together.

It tells him everything and when he looks onto the screen, he sees the hugging scene. The one with her behind him, bringing her arms around him, holding him close. It was a beautiful moment, it still is, it will be — for the show. They tell such great stories this year. This was one.

It’s the story of him and her, getting beyond the not-touching, the silly jokes, the trying _not to be_ so obvious.

Some scenes tell a lot. _This is one_ , he thinks.

“Would you change it, if you could?” she asks as she turns the gadget off. “Make things different.”

A question not about the show, more about him and her.

He frowns for a moment, all innocent. “Why would I?”

As he is not a kid anymore, he understands, sees the meaning. Would they be better without the thoughts, the ideas, that come late at night? In the dark and the cold, when they film side by side? Was it easier last year? Without the closeness, without the declarations they’ve made before the public?

She considers him for a few moments, reads in his eyes, and witnesses once more how their colour changes, like they are really attached to his moods and thoughts. She likes that, so very much. “Becau—”

Without looking, his hand reaches out fast. The movement makes her go silent, and he grabs her hand in a long, gentle motion.

 _We’re not Daleks, able to suppress the feelings,_ she thinks, and notices that her mind goes blank with his touch.

“When you were at the Doctor Who Experience in April,” she begins slowly, observing his hand.

“Yes.”

“Did you mean it?” She raises her head and hopes he will connect her question to something he said there, while answering question from fans.

He needs a moment, a short wrinkle flares up between his eyes, and vanishes as quickly as it has came, to be replaced by a short smirk. He thinks to know what she means. “The Doctor loves Clara. I think we all agree on that, don’t we?” He squeezes her hand and then takes his away. “She makes him better, she helps him to improve.”

“But that’s not how you phrased it.” Jenna grabs her IPad and packs it into the pocket next to her chair before standing up, the cold tea in hand. Not ready to go, but about to leave.

Peter replays the situation in his head. He had said during a time when they had been filming in two separate units. They hadn’t seen each other for some time, and when they did, it was only for short moments. It was a time he had missed her dearly, because she is his best friend and no one else understood the stupid jokes he made at that time.

She can see him think about it, the moment the little boy had asked him about his favourite companion, and he’d had to think about it for a few seconds. Answering in character, he had spoken of Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, and then something in Peter had risen to the surface, splintered the shell-like façade of his performance. An emotion, a memory — and for a second he’d been close to tears, before finding something that helped him away from the sadness. Clara.

“ _ **I** love her!”_

“I always wondered,” she said as she stopped at the curtain, one hand spanning around the rough fabric, “how much Doctor there was in you that day, when you said it, and how much Peter.”

He looked up at her, his eyes wide, not in surprise but in acknowledgement. Both his hands on the table, his right hand fiddling with the third finger on his left.

Neither of them is in a hurry for an answer, not after all this time.

Eventually Peter speaks up. “I've had occasion to wonder the same.”

Jenna looked up at his words. She needs a moment, but then it is clear to her what he means.

“ _I love you,” she had said into the phone while he stood by the console, giving her an opposite to act at._

Addressed to the Doctor of course, as she had stated later in an interview.

Sometimes the lines were blurry, between acting and not acting. It was not like leaving at 5pm, and shoving off Clara Oswald or The Doctor. It was easier for her somehow, while Peter seemed to be always in Doctor mode.

She had caught herself on different occasions thinking, that Peter was not playing the Doctor, but the Doctor playing Peter. And as professional she was and wanted to be, it affected her. Perhaps that happens, when you basically get married to a show like Doctor Who.

Sometimes there was much Clara in Jenna and vice versa. How much of Clara had been in her while speaking those words?

They share a glance, Peter giving her a cautious smile. When she snaps out of the memory with a blink, she returns the smile, her hand dropping down from the curtain.

“Funny isn’t it,” she laughs nervously — after all this time, it’s still hard to admit, to speak it out, to be clear. They have never learned how to deal with it. They are all caution and hyper-aware at the same time. After all those openly shared affections, there is still a line that they dare not cross.

“What is?” he inquires after a while, when she seems to have lost the thought. He stands now, has risen out of his chair, without Jenna noticing it — once more she had drifted out of reality for a few seconds.

Somewhere there is a sound in the distance of the set, the sound of the TARDIS. Sound check or coincidence?

“We wonder, and yet we actually know, don’t we?”

Peter doesn’t shake his head, only tilts it a bit with a half-smile, half-grin and a lick of his lips. “Yes.”

Then she’s gone.

The curtain has already swung back into a straight line when she shoves it aside once more, only her round face peeking through. “Oh, before I forget. Check the pockets of your chair.” And with a mischievous wink she disappears again.

Peter frowns, and his hand reaches to the side of his chair, patting against the pocket.

“What… ?” It’s not empty and he fumbles a little package out of it. Biscuits.

He’s pressing the package against his chest with a rustling, before he looks around, then he grins at the package. After he had stained one of his coats with chocolate — accidentally of course — and one of his trousers with jam, they had stopped offering biscuits in the catering truck. Of course, there was no official statement, it just happened, but Peter had a hunch. The costume department had nagged him about it for quite a while.

Peter makes a smacking sound with his mouth, capturing his tongue between his teeth in a grin, “Yeah, I think we can call this love.”

Jenna smiles behind the curtain, her eyes cast down, not having moved away yet. When she hears the crinkling of the ripped open packaging she moves on.

Sometimes they don’t need big declarations — sometimes they just need some biscuits.

End.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the read, and please consider a kudo or a comment. I really would love to read some. Critics are welcome and ideas and prompt ideas. I publish regularly here and on tumblr (colepaldi-in-the-tardis)


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